Retargeting the MetaHumans for Unreal Engine 5

In the last chapter, we successfully created our two MetaHuman characters and imported them into Unreal Engine. In this chapter, you will learn how to prepare them to use ready-made motion capture (mocap) animation files. However, before we can do that, we will need to convert these mocap files into something that can be used by UE’s MetaHumans. This process is called retargeting.

Mocap files exist due to traditional hand animation being a laborious process, taking weeks, if not months, to complete, and involving a large team. The development of these files is thanks to the film industry and pioneer filmmakers such as James Cameron, Tim Burton, and Peter Jackson (to name a few), with movies such as Avatar, Planet of the Apes, and The Lord of the Rings, where mocap was used extensively.

Since then, this technology has become affordable and can be generated using equipment such as the Rokoko suit (https://www.rokoko.com/), Movella...